Statement by David Ifshin, President, United States National Student Association

November 24, 1970
Release: 11:45 a.m.

The National Student Association and student body presidents from throughout the United States have been invited by students in Vietnam to meet and discuss the possibilities of a treaty to end the War in Vietnam. As final preparations were being made for our departure, NSA received a telephone call from the South Vietnamese Embassy here in Washington. They informed us that they had received the following cable from Saigon reading:

"David Ifshin is under no circumstances to be given a visa to enter South Vietnam".

This action on the part of the government of President Thieu, Premier Kien, and Vice President Ngoyen Cao Ky is not an isolated event. Viewing it in terms of the full scale repression within South Vietnam, and in light of the recent massive protests by the South Vietnamese people against the regime, this refusal to allow me to meet with the representatives of the South Vietnamese National Union of Students is seen as an attempt by the Saigon dictatorship to deny the Vietnamese people the right to talk peace with the American people.

Why is it that Ky's government is afraid to allow American students to visit Vietnam? Could it be that he fears that students talking with students might be able to work out a settlement based on common values-- a settlement which the Thieu-Ky-Kiem government and the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell government would find unacceptable. What is it that Huyen-Tam-Man, the democratically elected president of the Vietnam National Union of Students, has to say to me which so frightens the dictators of South Vietnam that they must mobilize their petty diplomatic bureaucracy to keep us apart?

The very day that the Saigon government denied my entry into the southern half of Vietnam, the United States military announced what amounted to the beginning of a new invasion of the North. Yesterday's helicopter raid deep into North Vietnam and the recent renewal of bombings is a clear indication of Nixon's strategy of maintaining in power a government favorable to United States' interest. This strategy is not only immoral and illegal-- it is impossible in the face of the determination of the Vietnamese people to win their right to decide their destiny without the coercion of the wealth and armed force of the government of the United States. This escalation, launched supposedly to liberate American bomber pilots captured over North Vietnam, is a fraud.

We are here today to confront South Vietnam's Vice President Ky. We are here because Ky, as a member of the ruling elite in South Vietnam, has the power to grant our visa applications. If he, a despot and a war monger, can come to the United States to advocate war, then why can't we, as democratically elected representatives of student governments throughout the United States, go to South Vietnam to advocate peace?

END

Statement by David Ifshin, President of the U.S. National Student Association

Release Time: 11:00, November 27, 1970

The recent bombing and incredible invasion of North Vietnam has made it clear to American students that they must vigorously renew their efforts to end the tragic war in South East Asia. We interpret the escalation of the war as a clear indication that Nixon--after ten years and 45,000 American dead--is still attempting to achieve a total military victory in Vietnam. In August, 1970, the representatives of five-hundred college and university student governments passed a resolution mandating the president of the USNSA to "engage in negotiations for a peace treaty between the students of North and South Vietnam, and the United States." Since that time, the USNSA has received invitations from the National Union of Students of both North and South Vietnam to explore this possibility. In response to these invitations, student leaders from all sections of the nation have assembled this week in Washington to prepare for a trip to Vietnam.

While in Vietnam, the USNSA delegations will engage in discussions and negotiations with the official representatives of the Vietnamese student unions. We are hopeful that we will return with a joint statement that will outline steps for ending the war. This statement will then be presented to a nationwide conference of student leaders, projected for late January at Kent State University. Hopefully, this conference will initiate preparations for major anti-war demonstrations to take place in the spring.

It is important to note that it has been one month since the delegation has applied for visas, and we still have not received them. The charge de affairs of the Vietnamese embassy informed USNSA that there would be no problem in obtaining visas for the American student leaders. On Monday, November 23, I received a telephone call from the Vietnamese embassy information me that a cable had arrived from Saigon stating "under no conditions will you issue a visa to David Ifshin." In light of the free passage of South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky through the United States, we strongly feel that the refusal to allow American students travel through South Vietnam is a bold contradiction of the democratic principles the United States government claims to be fighting for in Vietnam. We find it ironic that the government of our supposed enemy welcomes us to enter their country and meet with their students, while South Vietnam takes an unprecedented stand of refusing to allow the meeting of National Union of Students leaders with their foreign counterparts. We feel that it is incumbent upon the South Vietnamese government and President Nixon to explain why the duly elected representatives of American students cannot enter South Vietnam, especially in light of the recent trip by students supporting the Nixon Administration's viewpoint. We feel this situation is a further demonstration that the illegal and corrupt regime in South Vietnam does not want the American public to know what the true political situation is in South Vietnam. The students in South Vietnam have been joining with students throughout the world in protesting the war. Their actions in producing a redress of grievances with their government has resulted in the imprisonment, torture, and death of our fellow students. We feel a deep kinship and sense of responsibility for the students of Vietnam, and we shall follow the mandate of the USNSA, and even more important, the mandate of our conscience to do all we can to end the war.

NSA's David Ifshin -- a so-called radical who weighs his words - 4

He organized counter-orientation for freshmen, student government workshops, protests against Food Service and ROTC, student-owned businesses, a town meeting on university governance, hearings on discrimination int he construction trades, a grape boycott.

Ifshin, the politician and agit-propter, remembers those days clearly. "We would sit up all night discussing 'crises,' issues to have in front of the student body. We'd always have one good one out front--(like demanding a second piece of pie from the Food Service) and three or four on the back burners, ready to go."

He recalls this undergraduate manipulation with a smile on his face--and justifies it with an even-tempered ideology.

"Most students," says Ifshin now, "don't realize their relationship to the university. It's simply a question of self-determination. Take Food Service, the two pieces of pie that you couldn't get before. We make it the same with the war: the kids find out they're just too good for this kind of thing."

He activated blacks to press for "cultural enrichment," women for a campus gynecologist, students for a liveable environment. And he made the war a campus issue, gathering support for the October Syracuse Moratorium, the November Mobilization in Washington, a shut-down of the Syracuse draft board and the May student strike, a "spontaneous" reaction to Cambodia--before Kent State.

These were standard student issues. But in reacting to contemporary gripes like Food Service and discrimination, Dave says he tried to define them in a larger sense: through discussion and analysis, students could be made aware of an overall pattern inhibiting student freedom of choice.

"Walking seven or eight hours on cold morning and evening picket lines at school, I was affected more profoundly than at the Chicago convention. In the evenings, everyone would pass by, going home or out to have fun. The few students handing out leaflets were practically ignored." Says Dave Ifshin: "You do a lot of thinking out there."

Dave's father was a first lieutenant in the Army Air Corps in New Guinea during World War II. "We had a feeling of defending our country then," he says, "nobody ever questioned it. I don't want my sons in this war, I'm violently opposed to it. The kids have made us aware of how wrong it is."

Dave's sister Barbara, 24, information director for a Maryland advisory group to regional governments, brother Mark, 19, an electrical engineering major at the University of Maryland, both more conservative in thinking, marched with him in the Mobilization--"he galvanizes everybody around him." Sister Vicki, 12, is "very aware, going in David's path."

In his sophomore year, Dave's parents moved to a red brick rambler with a garden, two-car garage and white picket fence in Potomac, an affluent community of well-spaced houses, manicured lawns and cul-de-sacs. Says David: "It's a place where they can retire and give Vicki better schools and a better neighborhood to grow up in.

"My folks worked extremely hard for 15 years trying to make money to give us a better life. I wouldn't say they got rich off the black community. My father bought the store long before black power became a concept. They are innocent people trapped in an inequitable system. It's the snotty rich kids of banker parents out protesting for equal rights who get me mad."

Dave's campus politics hurt him academically--but not much. He was enrolled in the honors program with a triple major in English, religion, and political science, won the outstanding English major award of $1,000 and still graduated with a 3.6 average. Yet he failed to win election to Phi Beta Kappa (Faculty friends admit to him privately it was because of his activism.)

The student strike effectively closed down Syracuse for all purposes except graduation. Dave attended the ceremonies in corduroy pants and a checkered shirt, which was formal for him.

He is 6 feet, 170 pounds with an athletic build and looks wrong in a suit so he rarely wears one. "They had to get sophomores who weren't graduating to wear caps and gowns and fill up the seats," he says.

NSA's David Ifshin -- a so-called radical who weighs his words - 3

It is overly obvious that classroom boredom, for a bright student, is what first leads to a kind of good-humored alienation with The System that produces the boredom. The process of sometimes deadly serious politicalization that often ensues is not quite so plain.

With David Ifshin, the latter began with the travels. Later, when he entered Syracuse in 1966, it was a case of falling in with evil companions--a Sigma Nu fraternity house full of equally bright English majors who loved to talk all night ("incredible discussions of Vietnam!") about race and every other undergraduate subject a young man from Wheaton High had ever been concerned about.

When he first arrived at Syracuse, full of middle class ideas like curiosity, he had pledged Tau Kappa Epsilon, where they drank beer instead of talking. He was named pledge class president. One night when the temperature "was around minus 20," Ifshin directed the pledges to remove all the doors of the fraternity house. It did not appreciably raise the quality of the TKE's talk but it made him pretty popular over at the Sigma Nu house. He switched fraternities. And he began to move into campus politics with the activist Sigma Nus.

Dave remembers SU student government as "an important diversion and a Mickey Mouse operation." In early 1967, student government President Peter Jeffer, the son of a Great Neck funeral director, took a symbolic sip of Genesee beer on campus, in direct defiance of a university regulation. Chancellor William Pearson Tolley, who retired in 1969, dutifully placed Jeffer on probation.

The first outcroppings of dissent appeared. Students started a financially independent newspaper, book and snack bar cooperatives aimed at reducing university prices, a free university curriculum, protests for later dorm hours, longer Christmas vacations, protests against defense contracts, the Dow Chemical Co.'s recruiting, an Administration building sit-in to demand an end to ROTC. And an unsuspecting sophomore was shocked to find a mouse in his Food Service jello.

In the summer of 1968, Dave went to the Democratic convention in Chicago. He calls it a turning point, a depressing, alienating experience. "I went there to see a political convention and peacefully demonstrate against the war and ended up being attacked by police clubs. I had seen something up close and it was a police riot," he says.

"I was opposing a war then everybody admits now was wrong. It's a racist, imperialist war. It makes being an American almost a disgrace. The only way to have any self-dignity is to be an anti-war activist."

In retrospect, Dave admits that wasn't the exact language he would have used at the time. He was fresh from the sterility of his freshman year and he went to the Chicago convention expecting action. "Everyone was aware that things were going to happen. I felt a need to be there. I was very confused at that point and relatively upset by the series of events. The Walker Commission defined it for society as a 'police riot.' And I just made the connection."

"I remember visiting a bank . There were red lines on a map extending to 'free world' countries where the bank had investments. 'Free world' meant freedom for the U.S. to invest. I related it to the time I saw Cubans on television tearing down the Esso oil signs. They were rebelling against U.S. capitalism. The big threat in Chile now is that they're going to nationalize the Bank of America. The U.S. resists the right of a country to own its own natural resources."

Returning to Syracuse, Dave grew a beard and turned to reading Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Hegel, Marx and the early John Dos Passos. He is still an indefatigable reader and his library comprises more than 400 books--"for his birthdays all he wanted was books," says his mother.

The following spring, John Corbally, a 44-year-old vice president for academic affairs at Ohio State University, was elected chancellor of Syracuse and began what was to be the most turbulent year of that university's first century for two primary reasons. David Ifshin's student government presidency and football coach Ben Schwartzwalder's rift with black team members.

Dave revitalized student politics at Syracuse. He swept the campus on an independent slate having the endorsement of neither campus newspapers nor campus political parties. In denim cut-offs and sandals, he stopped at every dorm floor, attacking student apathy.

A week after he was elected, Ifshin staged a boycott which finally won the student dorms autonomy. Said the apostate Sigma Nu: "If we could turn the dorms into communities, there would be no need for fraternities."

NSA's David Ifshin -- a so-called radical who weighs his words - 2

Dave Ifshin isn't sure where the politics began. He doesn't like to call the process "radicalization," because off the telephone he knows and weighs the personal talk, the heft and girth of every word. And, anyway, he's "much more moderate" these days then he might have been during the Syracuse University years--way back there in 1967 and '68.

Wherever he is, politically, "it wasn't a steady process" but he thinks it began in the ninth grade at Belt Junior High when he took it upon himself to write an editorial for the school paper attacking a "conservative" Montgomery County school board for various budget cuts. The piece won him an award from the Columbia School of Journalism. But it also tagged him, for the school authorities, with a reputation as a very pleasant, much too bright maverick. It would follow him right through Wheaton High and his career at Syracuse University as hyper-activist student body president.

(Recalls Thomas Krafchik, Wheaton accounting teacher and student adviser: "Dave was always a stable individual, intellectually aware, easy to get along with, the type of kid you could joke with."

(Recalls Syracuse U. Chancellor John Corbally Jr.: "I found David to be a student leader who had considerable charisma and who was willing to work hard on projects in which he was interested. While we did not always see eye to eye, we were able to communicate with one another on a number of occasions when it was important to do so.")

Weeelll, now. At home, the family talk was straight American Immigrant Independent, with a sprinkling maybe of Grandfather Ifshin's old Kiev Socialist fiestiness ("actually, the folks are against big corporations and I guess they're Democrats but there isn't much political talk at home") rising from the kind of economic worldliness that comes from running a family liquor store business at 14th and R streets for years and years. These days Shirley and Harold Ifshin are anti-Vietnam War, David says, but otherwise orthodox politically. Again and again David Ifshin will tell you that "my father is the most profound influence in my life. He's spent his life not selling out."

It was in junior high that the boredom set in with David Ifshin. He read too much too fast. "I could get the semester reading requirements out of the way in the first week and then have to sit around listening to the banal classroom talk for the rest of the year. And it didn't get much better at first at the University."

At Wheaton, Dave ran varsity track and cross-country with the state championship team, belonged to Key Club, W Club, the student government executive committee and the National Honor Society, rewrote the school constitution and read Catch-22, The Naked and the Dead and anything else he could get his hands on.

"I remember Dave as an A-B student who was interested in going beyond class discussion," says history teacher Martin Rabunsky. "He was always of a liberal political persuasion, but polite and considerate. I do not remember him as a radical but the students have been involved more actively in the last two years."

Dave now characterizes Wheaton as "a very oppressive environment, intellectually stagnant, a social experience." He would run from 3:30 to 7, go to sleep early. On weekends he hiked, camped and indulged in a little covert drinking with buddies, "my first act of civil disobedience."

Once in awhile Dave played basketball at Freedom House and attended a few SNCC meetings that didn't hold his interest. "I was never a do-gooder," he now says. "Those organizations are a distraction from the cause of the problem . . . ways to assuage a liberal guilt complex. I never found them doing any good although I was committed to change in an abstract sense."

His first "politicalization" came while traveling with the Key Club to a Kiwanis convention in Dallas right after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was in St. Augustine, Fla., when a hotel manager poured acid into a pool full of blacks. In Pensacola, when a hotel clerk refused to remove a segregation sign. In Philadelphia, Miss., during the search for the murdered civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

Summers, David sometimes helped out in his father's liquor store.

"My parents worked long hours and never made any money off it," he says. "They had a white business in a black neighborhood. They tried to be fair, they never forced our views. The blacks had a Tom-ish response to me but it was an exposure to the situation."

During the riots after Martin Luther King's assassination, "We were messed up. They stole all the liquor and smashed the registers," says Shirley Ifshin. "Dave was in sympathy with the people and understood why. But he saw innocent people victimized and became strongly opposed to violence."

NSA's David Ifshin -- a so-called radical who weighs his words - 1

By Joan Kramer

David Ifshin was talking. And talking. The words tumbled out, stumbled over each other in the haste to be said. He loves words. His senior thesis was on the "The Restoration of Language" and God knows David Ifshin is doing what he can about bringing it back.

He is on his way to Vietnam. The phone calls are coming in from all over to his office on the second floor of the National Student Association headquarters on S Street. Yes, he's talked to Rennie Davis about that. No, somebody hasn't checked with Dave Dellinger.

Yes, CBS television was interested in the trip. No, NBC wasn't but there was some talk about equipment. Yes, the UAW organizer was getting the materials for the St. Bonaventure campus. No, they hadn't heard from South Vietnam embassy about the visas yet (North Vietnam was easy--it's the South that didn't want the world's student-libs poking around).

Yes the State Department was in touch. No, he hadn't had any sleep for 24 f------ hours. Yes, he'd be at Kent State on Monday and no, he wouldn't read the letter from the student leader in Saigon, the one who'd just gotten out of the "tiger cage," not over this telephone, he wouldn't.

Twenty-two and at one of the nervends of maybe the American political future: president of NSA, successor to Charlie Palmer. Ifshin sits in the president's office easily, looking like something out of Bukharin, lacing the telephoned "oh wows" with an "oppressed" here, an "institutional racist" there. And underneath the beard, the topical bombast the hard-to-take facts, a very good politician who is fond and proud of his family and isn't totally depressed over the Future of America--just a nice Jewish boy from Wheaton High having the time of his life, with Cambridge or maybe Oxford in next year's plans.

Conversation with U.S. Student Ifshin Reported

[Interview with National Committee Member of the Association of American Students David Ifshin; Montevideo, Uruguay, El Popular, Spanish, 15 October 1971, p 2]

Hours before the government, in one more demonstration of its hatred of liberties and its scorn for rights and constitutional rules, expelled him from the country (the only Americans acceptable in the eyes of the government are inspectors from the IMF or agents of the CIA), we had the opportunity to chat with David Ifshin, former president of the National Association of American Students (grouping student associations of 500 of the 800 universities in his country), who visited Uruguay after participating in the Congress of Solidarity with Vietnam, which was organized in Santiago, Chile by the IUS and the WFDY. Ifshin, who has visited the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and who currently belongs to the national committee of the Association of American Students, participated at Santiago as an observer for the association.

Question: What are the most important characteristics of the American student movement?

Answer: Until now, the student movement has centered its efforts especially on the struggle against the war in Vietnam and for integration of the black people. Another subject which mobilizes American students is the question of university reform.

Question: What do students demands concerning the reform consist of?

Answer: It is being demanded that the existing competitive system in the universities for achieving better qualifications and better positions be done away with. This is the present system, and it represents an application of the success theory to the university environment. This theory was very important as a factor for mobilization. But it was understood that what is behind this system is the capitalist structure, which finds expression through competition, as in racial discrimination or in the war in Vietnam. Developments in the struggles have brought the students and the black population to understand that the struggle for partial objectives has no future and that it is a question of involving the entire social and economic structure. One of the important elements in helping to clarify the issue was the slaughter at Attica.

Question: Was this reflected in the movement?

Answer: There is one chief contradiction within the students' and people's movement. Having a greater awareness of what the real problem behind each of these expressions is, and beginning to face up to a general questioning of the capitalist structure, there still exist sectors which center their struggle around a particular demand -- some for improvements, others for women's rights, others for the war in Vietnam, and others for university reform. This means that despite a growing awareness of the total problem, difficulties which hold back the development of the movement remain due to this attention to partial demands.

Question: How is this problem met?

Answer: The struggle against the war in Vietnam has been taken at the center, and through this an attempt is made to unify the movement. Last spring one of the largest demonstrations for putting a stop to the war in Vietnam took place. Even the reactionary American press admitted that more than half a million persons took part in this demonstration. Students, workers, union leaders, and even important personalities, congressmen, and senators took part. It was called by the National Action Coalition for Peace and the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, which not only called for the demonstration, but also for the application of civil disobedience measures. I mention in passing that the association of students belongs to both coalitions.

At the head of the demonstration was the Truckers' Union, one of the largest in the country, which takes part in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, as well as many other unions. In addition -- and for the first time -- veterans of the Vietnam War, in uniform, took part in the demonstration for 5 days, opposing the government and the Supreme Court. This is the first time in the history of the United States that war veterans have participated against a war that was still going on. This protest demonstration continued for a week and was headlined nationally. The Supreme Court order the veterans to withdraw. They refused, and Nixon did not feel encouraged to give the police a public order to throw them out by force, although that was the order requested. There was one point at which the police refused to repress the veterans. For that reason -- because that atmosphere existed -- Nixon did not have the courage to give a public order for them to be thrown out. The veterans camped at night in a park near the Supreme Court. This demonstration took place in Washington. Many of the veterans who took part in it had been crippled in the war.

Even the reactionary press commented in its headlines that the war veterans disregarded the Supreme Court. Many of these veterans appeared voluntarily to accuse themselves as war criminals for having been in Vietnam.

It is becoming understood more and more that the war in Vietnam is not an isolated problem, but only the most severe and the most concrete example of American imperialism: something that can happen in Vietnam, as in Bolivia, Uruguay, or another part of the world.

Question: Particularly, in Latin America...?

Answer: Especially at this time, the subject of Latin America is entering a crucial period, according to [copy unclear; possibly intended to read: as is understandable]. The U.S. Government has not defined a policy for Latin America because it finds no way in which to explain it to the American people. The movement is trying to create awareness, so that people will understand the imperialist maneuver before action takes place and not afterward, as happened in Vietnam.

I think that the conditions are being created and that we are arriving at a point at which it will be possible to restrain aggression, for example, of the Santo Domingo type. Nixon is keeping the U.S. policy more and more a secret and deceiving the American people, because the people's movement is becoming a force capable of checking aggression. The government is going to have to think twice before carrying out an attack or an invasion. Even the U.S. military power has been broken. The Army wants to get out of Vietnam, despite the fact that 10 years ago it wanted to go into Vietnam. It must be said that the morale of the soldiers in Vietnam has hit bottom. More than 20 percent of the soldiers are drug addicts. Of course, Nixon lies to the people. He is trying to sue not soldiers, but mechanized warfare: bombing raids, for example, in order to avoid casualties and the participation of soldiers in combat. He thinks that he can keep the war more or less secret, to the extent that there are no dead soldiers. Our work is directed toward making people understand that the problem is not one of dead soldiers but of imperialist aggression.

Question: What is the government doing about the movement?

Answer: Nixon responds on many levels. The first thing was to say that the movement was violent, irresponsible, and controlled by foreign powers; that is, the use of anticommunism. But it is very easy to answer this, because all the violence of the movement cannot be compared to U.S. violence in 1 day of war in Vietnam. I must say that the attacks against the left have strengthened the left.

In addition, they have again had recourse to supposedly liberal methods, saying that the United States is a free country and that everyone can express himself as long as he is not violent, also that anyone who tries to do something is an extremist. They also accuse the leaders with criminal charges, as in the case of Angela Davis or Bobby Seale, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers, who was jailed with the other leaders, and who was released recently. They try to isolate the leaders of the movement in addition to attempting to frighten the movement.

They also make it necessary to divert forces, since the struggle to liberate the prisoners draws off forces, requires much effort, money, and so on.

Question: What do the American people think of Latin America?

Answer: The American people know very little about Latin America. They have been indoctrinated with false ideas. Many of my leftist friends did not understand why I was coming to Latin America. Only one sector of the left is really aware of what is happening in Latin America. For that reason I think it is very important to coordinate our forces and our movements in order to make more information available concerning what is happening. I think we have much to learn from Latin American experiments such as Popular Unity in Chile, the Broad Front in Uruguay, and the National Assembly of the Argentines. Many people in the United States think Latin America is limited to Bolivia, Cuba, and Mexico. I believe that the meeting in Chile was very important, but I think that more open contacts must be made in order to make better coordination easier.

--Transmitted by the CIA as part of Operation MHCHAOS